Doja Cat wants to be silly and free again. She spent her last album, 2023’s exhausting, bar-heavy Scarlet, replying all to her detractors. The music was fiery in flashes, but on the whole guarded and reactive, Doja’s rage too often a single shade of red. She’s since called Scarlet a dalliance born of a need to relieve the pressure of pop stardom—“a massive fart,” as she put it, ever the troll. Tantrum concluded, Doja aims to get back to her sweet spot on Vie, a smooth collection of ’80s-inspired love songs. “I’m doing what I was perfecting in the beginning,” she’s said of her fifth album. “I’m doing what I know I know how to do.”

You’d think that would mean refining the bona fides that powered Hot Pink and Planet Her: earworm melodies, theatrical intonations and accents, agile flows that tumble and bounce. But Vie, named after the French word for life, departs from the candied and propulsive sounds of those albums. Instead of pushing further into genre-melting fluidity, Doja takes cues from the past. Her spirited performances make for a good time, but the music feels less intuitive and playful than her past work, as if Doja’s following a script rather than her instincts.

To complete her ’80s transformation, she taps superproducer Jack Antonoff. “New Jersey’s finest New Yorker” has production credits on nine songs, with instrument or recording credits on nearly every track—and he and the other producers go all in on the period fidelity. There’s punched drums, synths galore, samples from movies like Body Double and Conan the Destroyer, and way too many saxophone blasts. The occasional 808 pops up (technically also period-appropriate), but Doja is otherwise cocooned in the Decade of Greed. Vie is removed from the Y2K nostalgia that’s currently at the center of culture while scratching the same itch to escape the present.

Doja, born in 1995 and influenced by 2000s radio, doesn’t have a deep attachment to the era. There are no explicit tributes to ’80s idols, although she has cited Nina Hagen as an inspiration. (Hagen is “a hot girl who isn’t trying to just be a hot girl,” Doja told The New York Times. “She has layers to her.” Preach.) The rapper’s main idea about the decade is essentially that it was a time when girls just wanted to have fun—a message very compatible with the Doja Cat experience. Swinging synth-funk cut “Take Me Dancing,” another team-up with SZA, presents clubgoing as the perfect post-coital digestif. “You’re so raw, boy, and you’re so romantic/When you fuck me right, and then you take me dancing,” Doja sings on the hook, skipping across the roller-rink-ready beat in her airy upper register. She’s just as loose and fun-forward on the slow jam “All Mine,” cooing and harmonizing with herself over gleaming synths and keys. For Doja, the ’80s is a whole vibe.

That fuzzy connection to the decade mostly makes for a breezy listen, but Doja runs into trouble when the pastiche boxes her in. Her singing and rapping are uncharacteristically binary on most songs, notably “Jealous Type” and R&B track “Acts of Service,” where the cool melodies mostly keep time until Doja spits. This has never been a problem in her music before, but here when she switches from rapping to singing, it can feel as if she’s featuring herself rather than changing direction. All her expression and color seems to get reserved for the rhymes.

That’s the case on the groovy “Couples Therapy,” which features some of her deftest singing but really erupts with personality once she starts rapping. “Cussing you out, you the one I resent/Cussing you out, I delete and re-send/Sorry, I got three selves, one’s 12/Sorry, you gave me hell once felt/Sorry, honeymoon phase over now,” Doja raps, her repeated pauses and phrases mirroring a back-and-forth with a partner. She’s worked to close the distance between her rapping and singing, but Vie’s retro framework sharpens the disparity; the emphasis on homage seems to discourage Doja from filling these songs with the constant transitions that propel older tracks like “Need to Know” and “Talk Dirty.” Where on previous Doja Cat records every little melody and tic and punchline felt memorable, here it’s always the rap that stands out.

The exception is highlight “Make It Up,” which notably departs from the album’s retro aesthetic. Gliding across keys and bass kicks, Doja swings between melodic rapping and crooning while ad-libbing in both modes, the constant motion culminating in a quiet countermelody that accents the final hook and becomes the outro. It’s not an accident that it’s one of the stickiest songs. Although Doja clearly envisions Vie as her poppiest album, with ’80s pop as her aesthetic of choice, the record is most interesting when she’s ignoring such distinctions rather than embracing them. Pop rap has never been the oxymoron the heads want it to be; it’s just one of the genre’s infinite permutations. Doja could use the reminder.